He's a Museum Leader For These Troubled Times

By

Lee Rosenbaum

Updated Jan. 27, 2009 12:01 a.m. ET

New York

In early June, when Michael Conforti became president of the Association of Art Museum Directors (AAMD), no one could have anticipated the challenges that he and his colleagues would face just a few months into his two-year term.

As luck would have it, this country's leading professional organization for art museums now finds itself in the hands of one of its most seasoned and respected members -- director for 14 years of the Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute, Williamstown, Mass., and, before that, curator of sculpture and decorative arts at the Minneapolis Institute of Arts and the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco (a position he assumed more than 30 years ago). Mr. Conforti, 63, has long been widely esteemed as one of the field's leading thinkers and advocates.

ENLARGE

Ismael Roldan

Now hardly a day goes by without announcements by museums from Los Angeles to Detroit to New York of substantial reductions in programs, exhibitions, capital projects and staffing -- collateral damage from a global financial drubbing that walloped museum donors, retail sales and, most critically, endowments.

Even the enormously wealthy J. Paul Getty Museum last month announced a job freeze and other cost-cutting measures. Mr. Conforti's own well-off institution is slowing down its expansion. More dire was the situation at two poorly endowed museums -- the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA) and the National Academy Museum in New York -- which revealed they were on the verge of going bust. Both gained last-minute reprieves. But the academy's sacrifice of two paintings to raise cash was condemned last month by AAMD's board as a serious violation of museum ethics. The sales broke a cardinal rule -- that proceeds from selling art may be used only for buying other art.

So why does Mr. Conforti seem so upbeat?

Fresh from meeting with the architects for the Clark's expansion, he argued during a long conversation at New York's Harvard Club that this financially perilous period is "a great time for art museums." They are, he said, "bellwethers for people at moments like this. We saw this happen after 9/11. If we are doing our jobs well, we're the places that people can turn to in times of instability. The reality is that the Metropolitan Museum, the Minneapolis Institute of Arts and the Phoenix Art Museum are not going away."

But the National Academy and MOCA did come perilously close to "going away," due to financial circumstances specific to them that predated the general economic collapse.

The academy clawed its way back from the edge by selling two Hudson River School paintings -- its most important Frederic Church and its only Sanford Gifford -- to raise about $13.5 million for operations. By the time its desperation-driven plan to sell came to light on Dec. 5 through a report on my CultureGrrl blog, the paintings were already gone -- withdrawn from the public domain by an unidentified private foundation.

In making this risky move, the museum forfeited not only AAMD membership but also art loans from and collaborations with institutions that obey the strong recommendation of the association's board. "These objects are there for the collective cultural patrimony of the people who live in this country. They are not fungible assets," Mr. Conforti declared to me.

When he discovered that the academy had proceeded with the sale, ignoring his efforts to persuade its officials to address their financial predicament through other means, Mr. Conforti was angry. "I think we had, in this situation, an organization that was determined to sell and that sold before there was a public discussion," he said tensely. He revealed that he, along with AAMD's then executive director, had held a meeting prior to the sale with Carmine Branagan, the academy's then interim director (now director), and an academy trustee. He offered AAMD's help in exploring other strategies for financial recovery.

"We know that there were other options," he insisted. But his follow-up phone calls to academy officials, twice before its decision to sell and once afterward, he said, were never returned. Ms. Branagan's recollection is that "he called once and left a message asking if a decision on the deaccessioning had been reached. . . . I waited until the decision was final and called him the same day."

The AAMD's blackballing of the academy was a warning to other institutions that might have been tempted to sell art for a quick financial fix. MOCA trustees had considered that option but were fortunate to have been offered an attractive alternative -- a $30 million bailout from its life trustee, Eli Broad, who stipulated that there be no selling of art to raise operating funds.

For most museums, though, the issue isn't closure but cutbacks. On the day I chatted with Mr. Conforti, the Indianapolis Art Museum had just announced that it would trim its exhibition schedule, freeze salaries and postpone the opening of its Art & Nature Park. Nevertheless, Mr. Conforti believes that cutbacks will be "not as felt by the broad public as they will be by us internally. It may be that museums will have to go back to the level of programming of two or three years ago."

In another sign of the times, AAMD recently announced a late addition to the agenda for its membership meeting in San Diego this week -- a session devoted to the economic crisis, at which directors can identify themselves as "individuals in need" and "individuals who can help," as Mr. Conforti described it. His efforts to address these and other issues will be assisted, beginning Feb. 23, by AAMD's newly appointed executive director, Janet Landay, whose 31-year career has spanned five art museums.

But there's more to the AAMD president's job than money. The issue closest to Mr. Conforti's heart -- the focus of international conferences he helped organize in Rome and Salzburg -- is cultural exchange between American museums and antiquities-rich source countries. He hopes that AAMD's tightening of guidelines last year for acquiring antiquities of uncertain provenance will let the two sides move beyond their past repatriation battles to future collaborations -- on both archaeological digs and exchanges of objects, including long-term loans of antiquities to American museums.

Along with Maxwell Anderson, director of the Indianapolis Museum, he recently met in New York with Mario Resca, new adviser to the Italian Culture Ministry. On the table was "a new strategy to develop and coordinate all art-related cultural activities" between Italy and the U.S., according to the Culture Ministry's press release.

"There are ways in which we in the developed world can work with organizations in the developing world to share objects and learning and develop a common sense of professionalism," Mr. Conforti noted.

His "most important goal," though, is "communicating the importance of art museums to the American public. . . . At a time when the arts are being taken out of local-school budgets and when creativity and innovation in business require a kind of thinking other than what comes from math and science, the importance of art museums to society cannot be overstated."

His next stop in New York was a dinner for museum director-mentors and their prot&eacute;g&eacute;s, hosted by the Center for Curatorial Leadership, which prepares art museum curators for professional advancement. Talking about the CCL prot&eacute;g&eacute;e he was about to join for dinner, he glowed. "There's no question that Rochelle Steiner, the head of New York's Public Art Fund and curator of its Olafur Eliasson Waterfalls show, has a lot to teach me. It's probably the most exciting part of my life -- working with young people and putting my own ideas into some generational perspective."

With that, he took a phone call from his 17-year-old son and wished him a happy birthday.

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